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Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Eye of the beholder: John Hwang sees beauty in the most unlikely of places.

When John Hwang steps into the night and walks through Los Angeles' Skid Row neighborhood, he says a prayer. It's the same one every time. Guide me. Guide my steps. I'm open to anything. That warm August evening, he walked east toward the iconic Sixth Street Bridge. The city was breathtaking from his vantage point. As the sun set, the sky burned amber. Downtown LA's skyline seemed to glow. John feasted on the scene before him. But he also noticed he was all alone."God, what am I doing here?"he wondered.

Downtown LA nightscape. (Photos: John Hwang)

He kept walking. For some reason, John felt like he was supposed to continue on the bridge, even though he had no idea why. He took more photos of the city when suddenly a figure appeared. Startled, John looked up and saw a scruffy, bearded man standing there. "What time is it?" the man asked. It was a curious question. Had they met at a busy intersection or a crowded Metro stop the man's inquiry would have made sense. But here? In the middle of the bridge at night with no other human being in sight?John told the man the time. Close to 7 o'clock. Then he introduced himself. The man nodded in acknowledgement and said his name was Quinn."I don't want to sound weird or anything," Quinn started. "A few moments before you walked by, I felt like I had to get up. I was sleeping but something was telling me, 'Get up!' Then I saw you. I didn't want to scare you. That's why I asked you what time it was."The circumstance was weird. But in that cool, unexplainable, cosmic kind of way. Call it kismet. Call it fate. John knew he was supposed to meet Quinn. The men exchanged easy conversation that night. As they enjoyed the view of LA from the bridge, John learned more about Quinn. How he lost his construction job after falling from a roof. How the accident left him with a shattered ankle. How he struggled daily with humiliation, hunger and despair.Take a shower! You stink, man! the gang of kids would yell to Quinn, sometimes throwing rocks at him as they sped by on their skateboards. His tent got slashed. His things were stolen. But the worst was waking up to someone urinating on him. "Where you sleep, that's my shithole," the burly man scoffed.So Quinn moved under the bridge. Where no one would bother him."I've been really down," Quinn confided. "Been thinking about jumping off this bridge. But then I saw you... I feel like God sent you here to give me hope."As John put out his hand out to shake Quinn's, Quinn looked down in embarrassment at his hands, dirty and covered with cuts from rummaging through the trash for recyclables -- evidence of a day's work. So instead, John gave Quinn a hug. That night, the two became friends.

Quinn refuses to beg or panhandle. "It's a way to hold onto my dignity," he says.

So he collects recyclables to make a living. (Photos: John Hwang)

More to this lifeEverything was going his way. Everything society says makes a man successful -- a great job, a beautiful girlfriend, a loving family and loyal friends. But John couldn't shake the feeling of boredom. He longed for something more."I had nothing to complain about, everything was good -- too good," he recalls. "But I thought, 'This is it? This is everything I wanted?'"Depressed and wanting to dig deeper, John, a devout Christian, re-visited the Gospels. He devoured the Book of Matthew. "A lot of it is about caring for the poor, how much Jesus was reaching out to the outcasts, the most marginalized people of society," he says. "That really stuck out to me and I thought, 'That's what I want to do.'"So he went to Skid Row. Containing one of the largest homeless populations in the US, Skid Row is home to thousands like Quinn. This 54-block section of downtown LA became Skid Row in the late 1800s. It was an ideal congregating spot for runaways, hobos, aimless rail riders and transient workers because it was the last stop on the train for the whole country. Today, experts estimate some 3,000 homeless people call Skid Row home.A native Angeleno, John had always known about Skid Row. In the past, he had volunteered at homeless shelters and served meals at soup kitchens on Thanksgiving. "But of course it's way safer and more comfortable when you go with a group of people, when you drive in your car and drive back home," he says. "As opposed to now, when I go by myself."Six months ago, John ventured to Skid Row for the first time solo. Every day after work (he's an Occupational Therapist at Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park) he drove to the corner of 4th and Alameda, parked his car in the lot of a Korean supermarket and just walked. He had no plan, no agenda, no idea what would unfold and who, if anybody, he would meet. What am I doing here? John thought as he walked past empty lots, abandoned warehouse buildings and rows and rows of tents. The sickly sweet smell of urine punctuated the surrounding despair. Used needles. Feces. Trash. Like a foreigner in a foreign land, John looked sorely misplaced. People thought he was there to buy drugs. He refused to make eye contact with anyone. That first night was terrifying. But he went again the next night. And the night after that. John spent hours after work wandering Skid Row, saying prayers asking God to give him eyes to see. He became brave. Nerves gave way to a warrior-like spirit. He made eye contact. He started discerning the ones who wanted to connect."There are certain people, the way they look at you, there's something there," he says. "I smile. They smile. I ask, 'How are you?' and they open up."And then he discovered stories. Fascinating, heartbreaking, wonderful stories. "I was like, 'Wow! I need to document this!' That's when I started taking my camera."Images of the inner city -- poverty, drug use, homelessness -- portrayed by mainstream media are often cliche. Depicted through the lens of an outsider, these photos evoke at best, emotions of sympathy and at worst, a sense of schadenfreude. But John's work captures friendship, beauty, humanity. We see what he sees.John writes eloquent captions to accompany his photos. He gives his reader a window into the many lives he encounters.Like Walter, who has become one of his closest friends.

"When I take the time to listen, I find this gentle and beautiful man has manyintelligent and insightful things to say," John says. "Walter has becomeone of my dearest friends on Skid Row." (Photos: John Hwang)

"Walter is often the one to see me first. From far away he enthusiastically waves his

hands and calls my name. He hobbles over with his shopping cart and gives me a

hug. He calls his shopping cart his best friend because he spends all his
waking

hours looking for recyclables, and the shopping cart also helps him keep
his balance

as he walks. He
frequents all the local recycle centers, going 5-6 times a day. Sadly

one
recycling center he often goes to mistreats him. Even when he waits in line he is

the last to be helped. He is talked down to and treated like he is dumb or
crazy.

When actually he is a bright, hard working and sensitive man. It hurts
him deeply.

I can see it in his eyes. Walter grew up in rural Texas, during the
time of segregation.

So it brings back some painful memories. But Walter
refuses to feel sorry for himself.

He refuses to feel bitter. He knows his
worth as a human being. And I am honored to

know him and call him my friend."

And TC.

"When TC and I walk the streets of Skid Row together, it seems like everyone knows him," John says. (Photo: John Hwang)

"When
TC was a small child he was crying on the street alone. His father was in

jail
and his mother was in the hospital because his dad had beat her up so bad.

At
that time, his sister got molested by a neighbor. He was 10 years old and the

man of the house. He felt powerless. Until some older guys offered to protect
him

and his sister by beating up this neighbor. It turns out these guys belonged to the

Bloods, one of the most notorious street gangs of Los Angeles. They
became his

new family. He lived a life of violence, robbery, hustling drugs and weapons.

Often in and out of jail, he quickly rose to become one of the
highest ranking

members of the gang. What turned his life around was when he
was shot in the

head by a rival gang, he had a near-death experience that led
him to place his faith

in God. Now TC lives his life to improve the world
around him."

And Ronnie, aka Pepper.

Ronnie, who goes by the name of "Pepper," lives along the LA River. (Photos: John Hwang)

"Pepper has a tattoo of 'Lisa' on his arm, to
honor the one person who gave him

true love, his mother. He is HIV positive
and knows that his days are numbered.

He told me that what keeps him going is
that he wants to make people smile and

spread love as much as he can. He has a
beautiful attitude about life despite his

father being a very violent and
hateful man. His dad was a member of the Ku Klux

Klan and beat him and his
mother often. There was a time when Pepper also lived

a life of violence and
addiction. Despite losing much of his material possessions

and knowing that he
is dying, Pepper has gained something far greater.

The capacity to love."

An army of lightIt was especially dark that November evening. Someone had come earlier -- nobody knew exactly when -- to strip the street lamps of its copper wires. John was keeping company with a group of homeless men playing chess when suddenly a car pulled up. The driver got out and John was struck with how much the man looked like he could be the frontman of a British boy band. The kind stranger invited the group to a hot meal they were serving a few blocks away. When they arrived, John and his friends smelled the aromas of marinated fish, rice, fruits and cookies. As they ate, John learned more about Tyler Madsen, owner and designer of a socially-conscious clothing company called Love Nail Tree, located in the heart of Skid Row. That conversation sparked a small fire. John and Tyler shared about their hopes for the inner-city and talked about collaborating on future projects to help the homeless.

When Love Nail Tree owner Tyler Madsen and his staff close up shop for the night, they are often busy feeding homeless residents at night. (Photo: John Hwang)

When John pounds Skid Row pavement night after night, it produces countless encounters with an army of men and women shining light throughout the dark corners of Skid Row.

In the 90s, Stephen "Cue" Jn-Marie was part of the hip hop group College Boyz.Part rapper part preacher, he leads a church service every Friday night on aSkid Row street corner once notorious for drug dealers. (Photo: John Hwang)

"Today I had lunch with Cue Jn-Marie. Absolutely amazing guy! He has spent

the past seven years loving the people of Skid
Row; providing for their physical

needs, being their advocate at city council
meetings, connecting them to

community resources and giving out hugs. Every Friday night he has a church

service he calls 'a church without walls.' Cue himself
used to be a drug dealer. He was also an up-and-coming name in the hip hop scene back in the 90s, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Tupac Shakur. After living the fast life of fame, violence and drug abuse, he gave
his life over to God. Now he provides much-needed hope and love to the homeless
and marginalized."

Spread the love, lay it on thick

John keeps a virtual scrapbook of his Skid Row photos and stories on Facebook. His work has grown a loyal following. Each post receives hundreds of Likes and countless comments and positive feedback. "You really need to write a book!" "Your kindness is contagious!" "You always move me man, and I'm not that moveable...".It makes people want to do something.When John recently shared with Walter personal messages from Facebook readers, Walter was floored. "'People see in me things that I don't see in myself...' that's what Walter told me last night. He was referring to all the beautiful and encouraging emails he was receiving from all of you, my dear friends,'" John writes in a Facebook post. "He was excitedly telling everyone he knows on Skid Row, 'I am on Facebook and people are emailing me from all over the world!'"One of John's friends, Giao Nguyen of San Jose, Calif., was so moved by Walter's story on Facebook that she sent him a brand new Coleman camping tent."When I gave it to [Walter] last night, he was in tears," John writes. "Giao, you are AMAZING!"Rebecca Martin of Los Angeles donated her prized collection of National Geographic magazines to Richard:

but after reading my stories on Facebook, he had compassion for them. He said

that the
homeless man had a look of surprise and gratitude towards him.

And that left an
impression on my dad."

A beginning, a middle and an endHe saw her sleeping on the sidewalk across the street from the Greyhound bus station. Her sweet face, wrinkled and worn, caught John's eye. He was drawn to this elderly Asian woman. She looked like she could have been a long lost relative.He wanted to talk to her but he was already late to his friend's party. He made a mental note to come back. The next day John found her in the same spot. He asked if she wanted to have breakfast with him. They went to McDonald's.John bought Cam an Egg McMuffin but no matter how much he insisted she refused to eat unless he did, too. He was full, but ordered pancakes to make her happy.

There was food around Cam's mouth. John got a napkin and gently wiped her face.Tears began to well up in her eyes. No words were needed then.(Photos: John Hwang)

"She had the most amazing eyes, not just the way they looked but what was behind them," John says. "Like she was so happy to see me. Like I was visiting an aunt I hadn't seen in a long time."

He tried to make conversation. But Cam mumbled words to herself silently, as if saying a prayer. Probably dementia, John thought. He asked if she had any form of identification. Cam pulled out her senior citizen ID card. He snapped a photo of it.

He posted Cam's portrait and ID card on Facebook. "Does anyone have any connection to the Vietnamese community up in the Bay Area?" he asked on his post.

The image went viral and that night a case manager from Northern California contacted John. Cam was reported missing in San Francisco, the case manager said. She had escaped from her assisted living facility and somehow managed to travel 380 miles to Los Angeles.

Two days later, Cam was reunited with her family."That was the most memorable [encounter] because most of these stories have a 'to be continued' feel to them," John says. "But Cam's story had a beginning, a middle and an end. That left me with a feeling of amazement. It had a happy ending."The greatest rushJohn's friends always tell him to be careful when he heads to Skid Row by himself every night. Something could happen to you, they say. "I tell God, whatever happens, if I lose my life, if this is my last moment on earth, I'm OK with it," he says. "Because every time I go to [Skid Row] I get this rush -- like a high -- from when you truly care about somebody. You go to the darkest place and you try to be a light. You try to be a glimmer of hope and you get something so beautiful in return."That nagging feeling of emptiness has disappeared.He's at peace. "Maybe I'll do this in another part of the world," John says. "I want to go to the darkest, most hopeless, most rejected places. Because even the tiniest spark can be really bright."

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences." --Eleanor Roosevelt

Friday, November 22, 2013

I recently discovered this badass, self-assured, only 17-year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter who calls herself Lorde. I'm absolutely hypnotized and can only aspire to be 1/10th as cool as her. Her voice drips with gold. Delicious.

Monday, November 18, 2013

"Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you." -The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.(Illustration: Sarah Wilkins)

My best friend recently lost someone very close to her. For the past few months I have watched her navigate grief like a warrior, heartbroken and gasping for breath but never defeated. We've cried a river of tears together and the gaping hole in her heart has made mine in tune with hers, taking in sadness and reflecting on a life cut short (Michael died at 34) but lived well. It's caused me to contemplate my own loved ones, the risks we take when we give ourselves so fully and willingly in our relationships, and life's opportunities both seized and missed. I came across these heartbreaking and wonderfully-written stories on loss. I don't know if I was looking for them or if they found me but their words still linger, almost haunting me. In "Thanksgiving in Mongolia" reporter Ariel Levy recounts miscarrying at five months pregnant while on assignment halfway around the world. The second piece, "After a Parent's Death, A Rush of Change," writer E.J. Levy, reeling from her father's death, decides she wants to become a mother. And lastly, my best friend's own words on loss and legacy.Read, and be moved.

Thanksgiving in Mongolia

By Ariel
Levy

The New
Yorker

Nov. 18,
2013

My
favorite game when I was a child was Mummy and Explorer. My father and I would
trade off roles: one of us had to lie very still with eyes closed and arms
crossed over the chest, and the other had to complain, “I’ve been searching
these pyramids for so many years. When will I ever find the tomb of
Tutankhamun?” (This was in the late seventies, when Tut was at the Met, and we
came in from the suburbs to visit him frequently.) At the climax of the game,
the explorer stumbles on the embalmed Pharaoh and—brace yourself—the mummy
opens his eyes and comes to life. The explorer has to express shock, and then
says, “So, what’s new?” To which the mummy replies, “You.”

I
was not big on playing house. I preferred make-believe that revolved around
adventure, featuring pirates and knights. I was also domineering, impatient,
relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other
kids. I was not a popular little girl. I played Robinson Crusoe in a small
wooden fort that my parents built for me in the back yard. In the fort, I was
neither ostracized nor ill at ease—I was self-reliant, brave, ingeniously
surviving, if lost.

The
other natural habitat for a child who loves words and adventure is the page,
and I was content when my parents read me “Moby-Dick,” “Pippi Longstocking,” or
“The Hobbit.” I decided early that I would be a writer when I grew up. That, I
thought, was the profession that went with the kind of woman I wanted to
become: one who is free to do whatever she chooses. I started keeping a diary
in third grade and, in solidarity with Anne Frank, gave it a name and made it
my confidante. To this day, I feel comforted and relieved of loneliness, no
matter how foreign my surroundings, if I have a pad and a pen with which to
record my experiences.

I’ve
spent the past twenty years putting myself in foreign surroundings as
frequently as possible. There is nothing I love more than travelling to a place
where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing
about it. The first time I went to Africa for a story, I was so excited that I
barely slept during the entire two-week trip. Everything was new: the taste of
springbok meat, the pink haze over Cape Town, the noise and chaos of the
corrugated-tin alleyways in Khayelitsha township. I could still feel spikes of
adrenaline when I was back at my desk in New York, typing, while my spouse
cooked a chicken in the kitchen.

But
as my friends, one after another, made the journey from young woman to mother,
it glared at me that I had not. I would often listen to a Lou Reed song called
“Beginning of a Great Adventure,” about the possibilities of imminent parenthood.
“A little me or he or she to fill up with my dreams,” Lou sings, with ragged
hopefulness, “a way of saying life is not a loss.” It became the soundtrack to
my mulling on motherhood. I knew that a child would make life as a professional
explorer largely impossible. But having a kid seemed in many ways like the
wildest trip of all.

I
always get terrified right before I travel. I become convinced that this time
will be different: I won’t be able to figure out the map, or communicate with
non-English speakers, or find the people I need in order to write the story
I’ve been sent in search of. I will be lost and incompetent and vulnerable. I
know that my panic will turn to excitement once I’m there—it always does—but
that doesn’t make the fear before takeoff any less vivid. So it was with
childbearing: I was afraid for ten years. I didn’t like childhood, and I was
afraid that I’d have a child who didn’t, either. I was afraid I would be an
awful mother. And I was afraid of being grounded, sessile—stuck in one spot for
eighteen years of oboe lessons and math homework that I couldn’t finish the
first time around.

I
was on book tour in Athens when I decided that I would do it. My partner—who
had always indicated that I would need to cast the deciding vote on
parenthood—had come with me, and we were having one of those magical moments in
a marriage when you find each other completely delightful. My Greek publisher
and his wife took us out dancing and drinking, and cooked for us one night in
their little apartment, which was overrun with children, friends, moussaka, and
cigarette smoke. “Americans are not relaxed,” one of the other guests told me,
holding his three-year-old and drinking an ouzo. Greece was falling apart. The
streets of Athens were crawling with cats and dogs that people had abandoned
because they could no longer afford pet food. But our hosts were jubilant.
Their family didn’t seem like a burden; it seemed like a party. The idea
bloomed in my head that being governed by something other than my own wishes
and wanderlust might be a pleasure, a release.

I got
pregnant quickly, to my surprise and delight, shortly before my thirty-eighth
birthday. It felt like making it onto a plane the moment before the gate
closes—you can’t help but thrill. After only two months, I could hear the
heartbeat of the creature inside me at the doctor’s office. It seemed like
magic: a little eye of newt in my cauldron and suddenly I was a witch with the
power to brew life into being. Even if you are not Robinson Crusoe in a
solitary fort, as a human being you walk this world by yourself. But when you are
pregnant you are never alone.

My
doctor told me that it was fine to fly up until the third trimester, so when I
was five months pregnant I decided to take one last big trip. It would be at
least a year, maybe two, before I’d be able to leave home for weeks on end and
feel the elation of a new place revealing itself. (It’s like having a new
lover—even the parts you aren’t crazy about have the crackling fascination of
the unfamiliar.) Just before Thanksgiving, I went to Mongolia.

People
were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself.
I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert
pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl
who’d go to India by herself. And I liked the idea of telling my kid, “When you
were inside me, we went to see the edge of the earth.” I wasn’t truly scared of
anything but the Mongolian winter. The tourist season winds down in October,
and by late November, when I got on the plane, the nights drop to twenty
degrees below zero. But I was prepared: I’d bought snow pants big enough to fit
around my convex gut and long underwear two sizes larger than I usually wear.

To
be pregnant is to be in some kind of discomfort pretty much all the time. For
the first few months, it was like waking up with a bad hangover every single
morning but never getting to drink—I was nauseated but hungry, afflicted with a
perpetual headache, and really qualified only to watch television and moan. That
passed, but a week before I left for Mongolia I started feeling an ache in my
abdomen that was new. “Round-ligament pain” is what I heard from everyone I
knew who’d been pregnant, and what I read on every prenatal Web site: the
uterus expanding to accommodate the baby, as he finally grew big enough to make
me look actually pregnant, instead of just chunky. That thought comforted me on
the fourteen-hour flight to Beijing, while I shifted endlessly, trying to find
a position that didn’t hurt my round ligaments.

When
my connecting flight landed in Mongolia, it was morning, but the gray haze made
it look like dusk. Ulaanbaatar is among the most polluted capital cities in the
world, as well as the coldest. The drive into town wound through frozen fields
and clusters of felt tents—gers, they’re called there—into a crowded
city of stocky, Soviet-era municipal buildings, crisscrossing telephone and
trolley lines, and old Tibetan Buddhist temples with pagoda roofs. The people
on the streets moved quickly and clumsily, burdened with layers against the
bitter weather.

I
was there to report a story on the country’s impending transformation, as money
flooded in through the mining industry. Mongolia has vast supplies of coal,
gold, and copper ore; its wealth was expected to double in five years. But a
third of the population still lives nomadically, herding animals and sleeping
in gers, burning coal or garbage for heat. Until the boom, Mongolia’s
best-known export was cashmere. As Jackson Cox, a young consultant from Tennessee
who’d lived in Ulaanbaatar for twelve years, told me, “You’re talking about an
economy based on yak meat and goat hair.”

I
got together with Cox on my first night in town. He sent a chauffeured car to
pick me up—every Westerner I met in U.B. had a car and a driver—at the Blue Sky
Hotel, a new and sharply pointed glass tower that split the cold sky like a
shark fin. When I arrived at his apartment, he and a friend, a mining-industry
lawyer from New Jersey, were listening to Beyoncé and pouring champagne. The
place was clean and modern, but modest: for expats in U.B., it’s far easier to
accumulate wealth than it is to spend it. We went to dinner at a French
restaurant, where we all ordered beef, because seafood is generally terrible in
Mongolia, which is separated from the sea by its hulking neighbors (and former
occupiers) China and Russia. Then they took me to an underground gay bar called
100 Per Cent—which could have been in Brooklyn, except that everyone in
Mongolia still smoked indoors. I liked sitting in a booth in a dark room full of
smoking, gay Mongolians, but my body was feeling strange. I ended the night
early.

When I
woke up the next morning, the pain in my abdomen was insistent; I wondered if
the baby was starting to kick, which everyone said would be happening soon. I
called home to complain, and my spouse told me to find a Western clinic. I
e-mailed Cox to get his doctor’s phone number, thinking that I’d call if the
pain got any worse, and then I went out to interview people: the minister of
the environment, the president of a mining concern, and, finally, a herdsman
and conservationist named Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, who became a folk hero after he
fired shots at mining operations that were diverting water from nomadic
communities. I met him in the sleek lobby of the Blue Sky with Yondon Badral—a
smart, sardonic man I’d hired to translate for me in U.B. and to accompany me a
few days later to the Gobi, where we would drive a Land Rover across the cold
sands to meet with miners and nomads. Badral wore jeans and a sweater;
Munkhbayar was dressed in a long, traditional deel robe and a fur hat
with a small metal falcon perched on top. It felt like having a latte with
Genghis Khan.

In
the middle of the interview, Badral stopped talking and looked at my face; I
must have been showing my discomfort. He said that it was the same for his
wife, who was pregnant, just a few weeks further along than I was, and he
explained the situation to Munkhbayar. The nomad’s skin was chapped pink from
the wind; his nostrils, eyes, and ears all looked as if they had receded into
his face to escape the cold. I felt a little surge of pride when he said that I
was brave to travel so far in my condition. But I was also starting to worry.

I
nearly cancelled my second dinner with the Americans that evening, but I
figured that I needed to eat, and they offered to meet me at the Japanese
restaurant in my hotel. Cox was leaving the next day to visit his family for
Thanksgiving, and he was feeling guilty that he’d spent a fortune on a
business-class ticket. I thought about my uncomfortable flight over and said
that it was probably worth it. “You’re being a princess,” Cox’s friend told him
tartly, but I couldn’t laugh. Something was happening inside me. I had to leave
before the food came.

I
ran back to my room, pulled off my pants, and squatted on the floor of the
bathroom, just as I had in Cambodia when I had dysentery, a decade earlier. But
the pain in that position was unbearable. I got on my knees and put my
shoulders on the floor and pressed my cheek against the cool tile. I remember
thinking, This is going to be the craziest shit in history.

I
felt an unholy storm move through my body, and after that there is a brief
lapse in my recollection; either I blacked out from the pain or I have blotted
out the memory. And then there was another person on the floor in front of me,
moving his arms and legs, alive. I heard myself say out loud, “This can’t be
good.” But it looked good. My baby was as pretty as a seashell.

He
was translucent and pink and very, very small, but he was flawless. His lovely
lips were opening and closing, opening and closing, swallowing the new world.
For a length of time I cannot delineate, I sat there, awestruck, transfixed.
Every finger, every toenail, the golden shadow of his eyebrows coming in, the
elegance of his shoulders—all of it was miraculous, astonishing. I held him up
to my face, his head and shoulders filling my hand, his legs dangling almost to
my elbow. I tried to think of something maternal I could do to convey to him
that I was, in fact, his mother, and that I had the situation completely under
control. I kissed his forehead and his skin felt like a silky frog’s on my
mouth.

I
was vaguely aware that there was an enormous volume of blood rushing out of me,
and eventually that seemed interesting, too. I looked back and forth between my
offspring and the lake of blood consuming the bathroom floor and I wondered
what to do about the umbilical cord connecting those two things. It was
surprisingly thick and ghostly white, a twisted human rope. I felt sure that it
needed to be severed—that’s always the first thing that happens in the movies.
I was afraid that if I didn’t cut that cord my baby would somehow suffocate. I
didn’t have scissors. I yanked it out of myself with one swift, violent tug.

In
my hand, his skin started to turn a soft shade of purple. I bled my way across
the room to my phone and dialled the number for Cox’s doctor. I told the voice
that answered that I had given birth in the Blue Sky Hotel and that I had been
pregnant for nineteen weeks. The voice said that the baby would not live. “He’s
alive now,” I said, looking at the person in my left hand. The voice said that
he understood, but that it wouldn’t last, and that he would send an ambulance
for us right away. I told him that if there was no chance the baby would make
it I might as well take a cab. He said that that was not a good idea.

Before
I put down my phone, I took a picture of my son. I worried that if I didn’t I
would never believe he had existed.

When
the pair of Mongolian E.M.T.s came through the door, I stopped feeling
competent and numb. One offered me a tampon, which I knew not to accept, but
the realization that of the two of us I had more information stirred a
sickening panic in me and I said I needed to throw up. She asked if I was
drunk, and I said, offended, No, I’m upset. “Cry,” she said. “You just
cry, cry, cry.” Her partner bent to insert a thick needle in my forearm and I
wondered if it would give me Mongolian aids, but I felt unable to do anything
but cry, cry, cry. She tried to take the baby from me, and I had the urge to
bite her hand. As I lay on a gurney in the back of the ambulance with his body
wrapped in a towel on top of my chest, I watched the frozen city flash by the
windows. It occurred to me that perhaps I was going to go mad.

In
the clinic, there were very bright lights and more needles and I.V.s and I let
go of the baby and that was the last I ever saw him. He was on one table and I
was on another, far away, lying still under the screaming lights, and then,
confusingly, the handsomest man in the world came through the door and said he
was my doctor. His voice sounded nice, familiar. I asked if he was South
African. He was surprised that I could tell, and I explained that I had spent
time reporting in his country, and then we talked a bit about the future of the
A.N.C. and about how beautiful it is in Cape Town. I realized that I was
covered in blood, sobbing, and flirting.

Soon,
he said that he was going home and that I could not return to the Blue Sky
Hotel, where I might bleed to death in my room without anyone knowing. I stayed
in the clinic overnight, wearing a T-shirt and an adult diaper that a kind,
fat, giggling young nurse gave me. After she dressed me, she asked, “You want
toast and tea?” It was milky and sweet and reminded me of the chai I drank in
Nepal, where I went backpacking in the Himalayas with a friend long before I
was old enough to worry about the expiration of my fertility. It had been a
trip spent pushing my young body up the mountains, past green-and-yellow
terraced fields and villages full of goats, across rope bridges that hung
tenuously over black ravines with death at the bottom. We consumed a steady
diet of hashish and Snickers bars and ended up in a blizzard that killed
several hikers but somehow left us only chilly.

I
had been so lucky. Very little had ever truly gone wrong for me before that
night on the bathroom floor. And I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted
a child, that this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of
vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me. I was still
a witch, but my powers were all gone.

That
is not what the doctor said when he came back to the clinic in the morning. He
told me that I’d had a placental abruption, a very rare problem that, I later
read, usually befalls women who are heavy cocaine users or who have high blood
pressure. But sometimes it happens just because you’re old. It could have
happened anywhere, the doctor told me, and he repeated what he’d said the night
before: there is no correlation between air travel and miscarriage. I said that
I suspected he was being a gentleman, and that I needed to get out of the
clinic in time for my eleven-o’clock meeting with the secretary of the
interior, whose office I arrived at promptly, after I went back to the Blue Sky
and showered in my room, which looked like the site of a murder.

I
spent the next five days in that room. Slowly, it set in that it was probably
best if I went home instead of to the Gobi, but at first I could not leave. Thanksgiving
came and went. There were rolling brownouts when everything went dark and
still. I lay in my bed and ate Snickers and drank little bottles of whiskey
from the minibar while I watched television programs that seemed as strange and
bleak as my new life. Someone had put a white bath mat on top of the biggest
bloodstain, the one next to my bed, where I had crouched when I called for
help, and little by little the white went red and then brown as the blood
seeped through it and oxidized. I stared at it. I looked at the snow outside my
window falling on the Soviet architecture. But mostly I looked at the picture
of the baby.

When
I got back from Mongolia, I was so sad I could barely breathe. On five or six
occasions, I ran into mothers who had heard what had happened, and they took
one look at me and burst into tears. (Once, this happened with a man.) Within a
week, the apartment we were supposed to move into with the baby fell through.
Within three, my marriage had shattered. I started lactating. I continued
bleeding. I cried ferociously and without warning—in bed, in the middle of
meetings, sitting on the subway. It seemed to me that grief was leaking out of
me from every orifice.

I
could not keep the story of what had happened in Mongolia inside my mouth. I
went to buy clothes that would fit my big body but that didn’t have bands of
stretchy maternity elastic to accommodate a baby who wasn’t there. I heard
myself tell a horrified saleswoman, “I don’t know what size I am, because I
just had a baby. He died, but the good news is, now I’m fat.” Well-meaning
women would tell me, “I had a miscarriage, too,” and I would reply, with
unnerving intensity, “He was alive.” I had given birth, however briefly,
to another human being, and it seemed crucial that people understand this.
Often, after I told them, I tried to get them to look at the picture of the
baby on my phone.

After
several weeks, I was looking at it only once a day. It was months before I got
it down to once a week. I don’t look at it much anymore, but people I haven’t
seen in a while will say, “I’m so sorry about what happened to you.” And their
compassion pleases me.

But
the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black
magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would
rather have seen. Sometimes, when I think about it, I still feel a dark hurt
from some primal part of myself, and if I’m alone in my apartment when this
happens I will hear myself making sounds that I never made before I went to
Mongolia. I realize that I have turned back into a wounded witch, wailing in
the forest, undone.

Most of
the time it seems sort of O.K., though, natural. Nature. Mother Nature.
She is free to do whatever she chooses.

***

After a Parent’s Death, A Rush of Change

By E.J. Levy

The New York Times

Nov. 07, 2013

When my father died six months
shy of his 83rd birthday and my 42nd, I was shocked to find that in the midst
of grief, one clear desire emerged, uncontestable: I wanted a child. This was
not a decision, or even really a thought; it was more like a reflex.

I was sure of two things
growing up: that I adored my parents and that I never wanted to have children.
Like the writers I most admired, I wanted my legacy to be literary, not
genetic.

I had a vague notion that, like
Cary Grant, I might get around to having a child in my 60s. When a few writer
friends began to have children in their 30s, I felt vague pity, as if they had
admitted to something I refused: that my one life was not enough.

Twenty years ago, a friend was
so devastated by grief after her mother died that she fell into heroin
addiction. I’d felt for her, but I had not understood the depth of her sorrow,
the disorienting nature of loss.

Now, I did. Like her, I
was frantic with pain, desperate to give my life the slip. She became an
addict; I would become heterosexual, which seemed an equally outlandish choice,
each of us seeking to escape who we had been.

I had been a lesbian my
whole adult life, happily involved with women. But three months after my father’s
death, I started dating a man for the first time in almost 20 years. My friend
Marcela asked if this was about having a child. It seemed a ruthless question,
but I couldn’t deny it. Much as I dislike the reduction of love and desire to
biology, a mechanical rather than a richly intellectual matter, my interest in
men felt impersonal, hormonal, a little nuts.

I wondered if this
desire would pass, with grief; I hoped it would.

I’ve often thought our
life clocks are set by the age at which our parents bore us: my father was past
40 when I was born, my mother approaching that age. So it seemed fitting that
in my 40s, I would consider the question of children.

I used to tell people
how wonderful it was to come to things late in life, like all the books I hadn’t
read in childhood, when I preferred the tidier realm of math. Discovering
Austen, Eliot, Woolf and Cheever at 25 was a revelation, like watching all the
lights come on. (I fell for books when I fell for women.)

Before then, books had
bored me. They seemed such a lie against experience; no one led such shapely
lives. But now I understood that was the point. The artifice revealed truth.

But discovering late
what you long for can be heartbreaking, as any woman over 40 learns when she
finds that pregnancy is a long shot. It didn’t matter that people mistook my
age, that I looked younger than my years. Biology brooked no argument.

After 40, a pregnancy is
considered “geriatric,” a nurse told me during a brief bout of in-vitro
fertilization that I tried the summer after my father died. By 43, the chance of
pregnancy by I.V.F. was less than 3 percent; by 45, it would be near zero.

It did not matter that,
while working in Brazil the autumn after my father’s death, I visited a
priestess of candomble, an Afro-Brazilian religion, who saw a child in my
future. She cast buzios (small cowrie shells) and read the auguries. When I
asked about the prospect of marrying the man I was dating then — an obsessive,
destructive, marvelously distracting affair — she said, “You could marry him,
but it will not make you happy.” (This was not news.)

When I asked about
marrying my ex-girlfriend, who was my best friend, she said, “No!”

Disconsolate, I asked
her what my future held.

“You will meet another
and will marry and have a child,” she said. “But it will take a very long time.”

The priestess looked
ancient, ageless, somewhere between 50 and 75. Her handsome young assistant
looked up at me, skeptically I thought, as did the priestess. None of us
believed I had that time.

Eventually the grief did
pass, after utterly upending my life — prompting me to leave a job, a city, a
relationship, a way of life — but my desire for a child did not pass. If my
first love affair with a man in 20 years seemed in retrospect artificial and
absurd, it also (like fiction) revealed something true. I wanted to love; I
wanted a child. My one beautiful life no longer seemed enough.

When I met the man I
would marry, I didn’t bring up wanting a child. There seemed no point. I was
47. It was too late.

So I was surprised when
he said, early on in one of our long, rambling phone conversations, “I’d like
to give you a child.”

I laughed at the
presumption, even as I was touched.

“I’m not sure it’s up to
you,” I said.

We hadn’t slept
together; I wasn’t sure we ever would. I was both charmed and appalled by his
presumption that his virility was the decisive factor, not my age.

But his confidence was
contagious. Gave me hope.

A month or two later, on the
eve of the Jewish New Year, we spent the night together for the first time in
my Washington pied-à-terre. It was tender and passionate and as I fell asleep,
I knew (from the way my cervix felt, as if swaddled in a tiny sweater) that I
had conceived.

A few days later,
talking to a friend, I felt a pinch in my abdomen, like a needle prick, and
knew that the embryo had implanted; soon after, my nipples began to ache, my
breasts swelled, my sweat took on an unfamiliar sweet scent.

But I knew better than
to hope. Hope seemed preposterous at my age.

The following month,
while visiting family in Minnesota and attending a Nobel conference on
evolution (our version of a family reunion), I realized my period was two or
three weeks late. So I bought a test, and took it. Shocked, I took it again.

Then I walked into the
kitchen where my brother and mother were preparing to drive down to the
conference, and said, as we piled into the family car, “You’re not going to
believe this.”

Only then did I learn I’d
had a great-aunt who had borne her first child at 48. That my grandmother — who
had homesteaded in the Dakota Territories and was born when Queen Victoria
still reigned — had given birth to my mother a few months before turning 40 —
in 1926. For generations our mothers have been the age of grandmothers. Only
then did I learn that I am from a long line of pregnancy procrastinators.

I was ecstatic while
pregnant, blissed out for weeks, but then — predictably, heartbreakingly — I
miscarried, as so many women do at that age. In time, though, against the odds,
we conceived again.

And now, nearly seven
months pregnant, I am wearing some other woman’s body: gone is the gamin,
coltish figure that was mine. Sometimes the transformation terrifies, makes me
want to weep. Sometimes I weep.

A friend says that in
some ways it is easier to be a mother expecting a child than a father, because
your body prepares you for the alteration of your world. Well before a child
arrives, a mother’s life is changed: what she eats and can’t stand to, how she
sleeps, pees, looks. It is already clear that my life is not wholly my own.
What surprises me is that this is lovely. To be so altered by love, as I was by
grief.

Sometimes, when I
consider the fact that I am about to become a mother midlife, at the age I
might have become a grandmother, I feel like a freak. I remind myself that
midlife parenthood has not been considered bizarre for men; it’s been a sign of
vitality. For centuries men have been able to make a name, then make a family.
Henry VIII was 46 when his last child was born; Arthur Miller was 51; Norman
Mailer was 55; Laurence Olivier, 59; Cary Grant, my model, was 62 when he
became a parent.

I will be in my 60s when
my child is in college, as my father was. A few friends my age are
grandparents. But most of my friends have come late to parenting, if not quite
as late as I will. I worry I may not have the energy, but I know I will not
have the resentment, either.

My mother was a devoted
yet thwarted parent — her potential (as a pianist, a painter, a physician)
squandered for the sake of changing our diapers, attending the PTA. A fact I
never forgot.

While
some may associate the word with pioneering and innovation, status and
accomplishment, and/or effectiveness in numbers, in the last weeks since the
passing of Michael Chough, one of my most beloved best friends, none of these
aspects have come to mind - nor have they mattered.

Instead,
Michael Chough, who lived 34 short years on this earth, lived so well and
leaves a legacy because he LOVED others so well. His heart, like a good
compass, always pointed true north. And this was best reflected in how he
treated family, friends, children, and dogs alike.

Michael
consistently put others before him. His happiness came from the happiness he
could provide for his family and loved ones. So his time and agenda was
sacrificed to meet yours. An upstanding man, a devoted son, and a fiercely
loyal friend, Michael blessed where he went. Those of us lucky enough to
experience Michael’s big, big heart, his child-like zeal and head-bopping, and
his uwavering loyalty and support, know that we received life’s most precious
gift from him: LOVE. And when he said - often without fear or restraint to his
brothers and sisters alike – that he loved you, he meant it from the bottom of
his sincere, sweet, compassionate and pure heart.

But he
didn’t make time just for his family and close friends, he noticed the waitress
or cashier or stranger asking for a hand-out as well. Michael loved daily
whoever came across his path. He made time to connect, to brighten another
person’s day with words of encouragement, no matter what personal stress or
physical pain he might have been enduring. In fact, there would be times when I
was impatient and critical, wondering why he had to spend that 5-10 extra
minutes talking to the waiter. And often by the end of their exchange, I would
see the bright smile on that stranger’s face, and my self-focus was instantly
humbled by Michael’s generosity in attention and time for others.

Warm,
affable, authentic, comfortable in his skin, Michael had courage to let you in.
And in turn, you felt comfortable and accepted instantly. If you were brave too
and let your walls down - bam! In Michael’s eyes, you both had an instant and
true connection and friendship. Michael was such the man that he was in touch
with his feelings, and was willing, patient, and kind in sitting with you and
yours, listening with no judgment. So good-natured was he.

In the
last few months, he experienced increasing pain down his back and his sciatic
nerve, yet he accomplished I believe everything God purposed for him. Limping
with a cane, Michael made time to visit a close buddy after his heart surgery
at 10:30 in the evening. Michael also had been praying these last few years for
another close friend and recently had the privilege and blessing to experience
that prayer answered; Michael led his friend to accept Christ in his own home
before Michael “went home.” In addition, Michael thoughtfully printed out a
thick packet of scripture verses to encourage me. And lastly, in the two weeks
out in Texas on a new venture, Michael leaned into God for his needs even more
than ever. If you had the chance to hear him tell the story (Michael was such
an animated story-teller!) of his run-in with what seemed like the food truck
underground mafia, you might have gained a glimpse into Michael’s brave heart
as well as sensed that perhaps two tall angels had flanked and escorted Michael
home safely that night.

So I
believe, in these last months of physical pain and restriction, Michael lived
well because he still managed to love others well. These are the examples I am
aware of and I bet others can add more.

Michael,
dearly loved by our Father in Heaven, was close to the Lord before his earthly
tent was exchanged for God's temple in Heaven. I sense Michael’s spirit at
peace, loving upon us right now, grateful as he always is for the present
moment, and chillin’ with our Father in Heaven. He might even be beaming and
wearing those diamond stud earrings I always found a bit too sparkly - right
now…:-)

An
optimist and truth-seeker who didn’t care about what others thought and would
tell you any nay-sayers could “kick rocks,"

A warrior
and fighter with Heart who persisted in “making each day a good day,”

A lover
of God, family, puppies! children! the elderly, and the hurt,

A fan of
dance, Crossfit, and K-pop,

Michael
created beauty around him because he focused on the beauty in others. There
would not be one encounter with him in which he did not exchange an
encouragement for - or a good, honest, loving tease that was “en pointe” about
you.

What a
true and good and amazing man!

While I
am so deeply sad in missing his presence, I can not help but be deeply grateful
and forever changed for having experienced Michael’s love, friendship, and
spirit closely. His goofiness and authenticity extended freedom for me to be
me. His faithful love nourished my heart as a woman. And his support and belief
in me helped me soar as a person and artist. I want to honor him and what he
taught me by example by living and loving like he did, following the legacy he
leaves us.

I love
you and I miss you very much, Paws! And I look forward to Heaven when we see
each other again, dear friend.